{UAH} Bobby Take it from a former spy: the accusations against Jeremy Corbyn should be taken very seriously SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE

Frank Mujabi,

Here is the former head of MI5 himself adding his weight to the smear campaign that Jeremy Corbyn was a " communist spy". The strange thing about this smear is that MI5 and all the security agencies have all along labelled Corbyn as a Communist, and carried out aggressive counter-surveiilance against him and others. What is clear is that the British establishment is getting very worried about an imminent Labour victory and of Corbyn becoming Prime Minister. They tried to get rid of him via an internal coup within the Labour party  but only ended up making him even stronger. They will certainly fail again because the smear tactics are not going to work,

Bobby

Take it from a former spy: the accusations against Jeremy Corbyn should be taken very seriously

• SIR RICHARD DEARLOVE

23 FEBRUARY 2018 • 9:45PM

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Jeremy Corbyn in the 1980s CREDIT: CLIFFORD LING/TELEGRAPH

Jeremy Corbyn seems to think it sufficient to laugh off the criticism he has faced for meeting with a Czechoslovak intelligence officer in the 1980s. It is not. I worked against the Czechoslovak Services during my early career in MI6, I served in Prague and I spoke Czech. Everything I learned about the way those services, known as the StB, operated tells me that these accusations should be taken seriously.

Firstly, there is the codename given to Corbyn by the StB, "COB". If the StB had allocated him a pseudonym, it meant that they had opened an operational file. They would only do that if they had reason to be interested in him as a target and they had assessed him as someone with whom to develop a relationship.

As has been repeatedly made clear, the Cold War Czechoslovak spy Jan Sarkocy is a fantasist whose claims are entirely false and becoming more absurd by the day.Corbyn spokesperson

The Czechoslovak Services had a history of attempting to recruit Members of Parliament and they started out by trying to find who among them got drunk, who was in debt, who had personal problems and whose career was on a downward trend.

It was not necessary to know state secrets to be of interest; simply to know a lot of what was going on inside Parliament. The StB's ultimate aim, therefore, was to identify who might be recruitable and as step towards that goal to cultivate those willing to talk to them in order to get them to divulge, often unwittingly, who those vulnerable individuals might be.

It is mundane work undertaken by a member of a foreign intelligence service, but still a significant threat to our national security. Anybody with sense would have taken care to avoid someone like Jan Sarkocy, the intelligence officer in question.

Corbyn questioned over Stasi connections

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Secondly, there is the absurd suggestion that Corbyn could not have know that Sarkocy was a Czechoslovak intelligence officer. It was well known at the time that the StB was active on behalf of the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, and there was a well established pattern that the StB had followed in trying to recruit British politicians, including three MPs that they had recruited successfully in 1960s.

By the standards of Central Europe, the Czechs were extremely westernised. The Russians regarded them as more sophisticated than other parts of their Communist empire and particularly adept at challenging intelligence work. Soviet bloc diplomats were also being regularly expelled from the UK for espionage activities during this period. Corbyn surely would have been well aware of this.

Even had he been so naive that he had not seen through Sarkocy's diplomatic cover, the regime Sarkocy represented was known to be one of the nastiest in Central Europe, continuing to persecute its dissidents right up until the Velvet Revolution. They were not people with whom to consort without sharing their extreme views. Corbyn seems to have enjoyed rubbing shoulders with regimes that were undemocratic, conducted mass surveillance of their populations and ruled by a combination of force and fear.

Thirdly, Labour has said that Sarkocy should not be taken seriously and that his claims are absurd. Discussion I have had with friends close to the current Czech intelligence community suggest otherwise.

Sarkocy is behind the claim that Andrej Babis, the current Czech prime minister, collaborated with the Communist regime, which is being taken seriously in his country. Babis's lawsuit against those claims, which he says are false, was last week dismissed by a Slovak court. There is therefore some grounds for thinking that Sarkocy could be telling the truth about Corbyn.

Corbyn has questions to answer. How many meetings did he, in fact, have with Sarkocy? If only a couple, or the single one that Corbyn recalls, his behaviour can be put down to stupidity. If Sarkocy is telling the truth and not exaggerating when he says there were many more and that money changed hands (which again Corbyn denies), then this affair takes on a completely different aspect.

Finally, there is the issue of how the StB documents on Corbyn entered the public domain. I suspect that someone with access to the StB archives found them, noticed they were about Corbyn, realised they were of value and sold them on. We do not know if further documents exist but, if they do, and contain more incriminating information, it leaves Corbyn – who could yet become Prime Minister – in a very awkward position.

Sir Richard Dearlove was head of the Secret Intelligence Service from 1999 to 2004

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